Vehicles have foot wells in which the driver and passenger place their feet. The foot wells are commonly equipped with carpeting. Often, the automotive manufacturers offer floor mats to protect these foot wells. Automotive aftermarket manufacturers also offer floor mats for these foot wells, many of which are customized for the size and shape of foot wells for particular makes and models of cars and trucks, and others of which are meant to fit (somewhat) in a large variety of such makes and models.
Some automotive aftermarket floor mats are so-called “cut to fit” floor mats, by which the consumer is instructed to cut the floor mat to fit his or her vehicle. It is known to provide scribe or cut lines for this purpose.
Even with many such cut or trim lines, the best fit that a consumer is able to achieve still leaves room for improvement. One problem is that while driver's side and passenger side foot wells can take radically different shapes in recent cars, conventional cut-to-fit mats are offered in pairs that either make no accommodation at all for the side of the car in which they are to be used, or at most are mirror images of each other. Further, the presence of numerous ones of such trim or cut lines affects the ability of the mat to conform to the surface it covers, in that each such trim line has a tendency to create a hinged joint at which the mat will preferentially bend, and around which adjacent panels will rotate. Some conventional cut-to-fit offerings merely provide a multitude of uniformly sized rectangular cells with the user choosing which of the cells are to remain with the mat, and which of the cells are to be trimmed off. The result is a trimmed mat with a jagged outline with many sharp internal corners, an outline which is more susceptible to tearing, which is aesthetically suboptimum, and fits to a particular foot well only as a function of how small and numerous the cells are.